Beginning winter, dreaming of summer

Here we are in early December, with six inches of snow on the ground and more every day. Now is the best time for me to start thinking about summer, but not for the reasons you'd think!

Tour activity slows way down in December, since schools are busy wrapping up before break and most people are bogged down with Christmas-related extracurricular activities. This gives me more time to start dealing with the outreach boom that will come in July/August 2009:

July 12-24: NSCL/JINA offer the inaugural "Nuclear Astrophysics" course for students in MSU's Mathematics, Science, and Technology (MST) program. MST attracts over 100 middle school students every summer for an intensive two-week course in multiple subjects. Here at the lab, we've been looking to expand our outreach to this age group by offering them something similar to what PAN does for high schoolers. MST is a golden opportunity, since they handle all the logistics (including housing!) while we provide the science content. I'm excited to do this for the first time... I'll teach some of the classes, while "guest lecturers" from NSCL, Notre Dame and maybe U-Chicago take on the rest of the topics!

July 25-26: The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) is meeting just down the road in Ann Arbor this week, and we're taking advantage by offering two workshops.

• A full-day visit to our lab, including a tour, lecture, and time working with MoNA data
• A half-day workshop in A2, including a presentation about NSCL outreach opportunities and hands-on experience with the marble nuclei lesson

Then I have almost a whole week of "relaxation" before the high point of the outreach year.

August 2-14: Physics of Atomic Nuclei XVI! This year features some big changes from the 2008 program. Participants will be excited to find that they're housed in Shaw Hall, right across the street from our lab! In past years, they were located in dorms at least ten minutes away, though Snyder Phillips did have the advantage of a much better cafeteria. Even more significant is that teachers will now only participate for one week, separate from the students. This is in response to two commonly-expressed concerns: it's difficult for teachers to take two full weeks out of their summer for PAN, and they would rather focus on their own professional development than teach students as they do the rest of the year. In light of this change, we are hoping to attract more teachers, and are prepared to accept up to twenty. I'm super excited to see more teachers at PAN because I think working with them can have the biggest impact of anything NSCL Outreach does.

Somewhere in there, we'll give a couple of large tours for Grandparent's University visitors as well. Should be a fun summer!